We decided early to make a game that challenged us technically and we knew beforehand that the game would be incomplete because of it, given the short time of 3 days. Thus, our goal this jam wasn't to make the most enjoyable game but instead something that is rather unique / uncommon.

Making the world spherical had a lot of time consuming challenges. From the start we used a sphere object, made our own gravity system etc. At that point, the world was an actual globe. However, half-way through we decided that using what Unity calls Terrain objects, would be really nice for making different levels, especially the feature that allows mass placement of trees, making hills and drawing textures on the ground. It's basically a great level design tool.

From what we know, no body has made a curved world from the terrain object before. So we had to make our own custom shaders for every different type of object in the world including the terrain, which the latter has no documentation what so ever and it needs to support drawing multiple textures on it (which it now does!). As if that wasn't enough, every regular object needs a different custom shader to curve along the terrain. And every particle effect also needs yet another different shader to to follow the curved world.

By using the above, we could also use Unity's physics engine instead of making our own hack like we did initially with the gravity. (Because the world is actually flat, but renders curved to the player.) The result turned out pretty good technically speaking. However, level design, music, bugs etc had to suffer because of the little time left over in the jam.

The reward for all the trouble is knowing that future level design and game mechanics will be so much better and faster to make if we decide to continue developing the game. However, I'm personally unsure whether a spherical world adds to the fun or not for the players. Maybe it is more annoying than cool?

If you have any feedback regarding whether a spherical world look and feel good or bad, we would appreciate it.

Please note, we have not made any post-jam releases to fix any of the bugs. (They're still present)

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/mojo

This post is very focused on the curved world but there was a lot more to the game than just that. So I would like to hand out special thanks to my team who made the UI, skybox, , characters, animations, scripting etc.